Society Needs an Alternative Web
forbes.com
forbes.com
Email is federated, but everyone running and managing their own email servers is too costly, so for consumers, it migrated to large sites. Web sites were federated, but everyone being web master for their homepage was too difficult, so we get GeoCities, and Yahoo Clubs, and later, Squarespace and Wix, etc. Then blogs were decentralized, but everyone self hosting and authoring blogs was too much, so then we get Wordpress.com and Tumblr, and Twitter, and FB, etc. (even USENET eventually developed super-large hubs like uunet)
For a federated, decentralized system to work and resist centralization, it has to be the case that running a node is dead simple, cheap, and out-of-sight/out-of-mind. It also can't be the case that hosting on a more powerful cluster, colocated with other nodes, gives you large benefits or cost advantages, otherwise, it'll just get centralized again.
Even cryptocurrencies fail this. They have terrible efficiency, but at least they were supposed to be relatively flat, instead of centralized and hierarchical, but instead, a majority of the hashing power is owned by a few large entities, so in effect, back to large financial players controlling much of the power.
I think one day we'll discover some ways to decentralize things in ways that resist re-centralization, but in the mean time, beliefs that you'll achieve cyber/crypto-anarchy by clever protocol design and the federales won't be able to rubber-hose-cryptanalyze you, is a dangerous belief that diverts us away from demanding the government and society agree to the goals of freedom. If everyone wants unfreedom, underground internet usage is a slim consolation.
I think this is what federation looks like when it works. Yeah, everyone uses Gmail, but it's also ok to use another service. It still works and delivers a pretty similar experience. Your messages make it out of the Gmail garden.
> Web sites were federated, but everyone being web master for their homepage was too difficult, so we get GeoCities, and Yahoo Clubs, and later, Squarespace and Wix, etc. Then blogs were decentralized, but everyone self hosting and authoring blogs was too much, so then we get Wordpress.com and Tumblr, and Twitter, and FB, etc. (even USENET eventually developed super-large hubs like uunet)
Geocities was one of many roughly equivalent services. It was sort of a social network, but it was mostly just free hosting. Anyone could still link to anywhere and being on geocities wasn't a requirement for being on the web.
Squarespace is a pretty good product and not what I would consider harmul centralization, because it's still interoperable with other websites and they don't prevent people from hosting elsewhere. The web is still federated.
Something different has happened with social media. Different social media services aren't interoperable. I can't message you on Twitter from Facebook, or tweet at you on LinkedIn. You must stay in their walled garden to interact with their users. They're at such a critical mass that almost everyone is in their garden.
It seems like federation is a happy middle ground between decentralization and centralized walled gardens.
Maybe something like Mastodon will some day become so popular that Twitter is forced to become part of the federation and compete on features and marketing instead of vendor lock-in.
With a federated version of any type of social media clone, eventually new entrants will prefer to join the federation instead of trying to make a new walled garden. It wasn't really an option for Hotmail to only let you interact with other Hotmail users, because the federation was already established.
There was tremendous demand for social media services, but no federation to provide those services when the demand hit and explosive growth happened, so now we have a centralization problem.
I was using s small British provider, and almost by accident discovered at some point in time that emails I sent to gmail addresses in the prior 2 months had been marked as spam, unless they were a reply something sent to me (so it wasn’t true that everything got lost - only stuff I originated).
I gave up and moved to FastMail because I don’t have the time to deal with this (and solving it once is no guarantee it won’t happen again)
So, email is federated but effectively not decentralized - unless you use one of the central services, you are at risk from being obliviously blackholed at any second (that happens to large providers too, but there’s safety in numbers - it will be discovered sooner by someone)
Looks like Google will have to keep the 5bn "fines for stupid things we do to EU citizens and companies" line on their budget for years to come.
I don't think this will fly when the relevant authorities finds out (a nice mix of protecting local business and punishing an annoying company that have ignored the rules too many times).
And frankly I think that is great!
Hoping Google will sooner or later return to their roots as Internet superhero.
Meanwhile get ready for more fines, I'm especially looking forward to the almost-destroying-browser-competition-on-desktop fine that I've been waiting for a while. : )
I've seen public entities switch to Office 365 in order to "get rid of spam" and thereby losing a lot of incoming legitimate mails in the same process. A fact that is worsened by users using the "Mark as spam" button to delete legitimate emails from their inbox (a practice that is horribly common).
Going from that to billion-EUR fines to Google and Microsoft is a very, very long way.
Companies need to validate email addresses.
I get AT&T bills, OnStar notifications, etc. I have never used any of their services. Someone else probably signed up with my email address.
Additionally, other companies are violating the CAN SPAM Act by hiding the unsubscribe ability behind a log in. Nextdoor does this.
You are, of course, absolutely right re. spam and rightfully so. On the other hand, I regularly get spam reports re. 100% legitimate mails, often in the middle of longer email conversations and so on, and where one side of the conversation marks entire email threads as spam.
We always follow up on spam complaints and the one thing we do get often in cases like that is that the other party only wanted to delete the emails and didn't realise there were other consequences.
Yes, there's a lot of people that knows how to use the "Mark as spam button". I still, however, maintain the position that a lot of other people don't know how to use such features.
I would unsubscribe and delete, but have not really thought about marking as spam or not yet. Just interested in some input there.
If I would get it from a company where I have not signed up the answer is of course obvious.
When I get the old "you'll be removed from our list within 10 days" message, I generally reply to it with a quick message: "Please remove me immediately or your next message will be marked as spam". Many times the sender has complied with a personal response provided someone saw my message, even for some large companies with "no-reply" emails.
For smaller companies - especially the mom and pop type operations - I'll usually give them a friendlier notice. "Hi, I unsubscribed and I'm still getting emails. Please remove me as I'd really rather not mark your messages as spam". I usually get a friendly personal response with apologies and a removal.
In all cases, after the company has been warned, I don't think twice about sending them to spam.
Then I discovered my provider didn't set up SPF and DKIM correctly so emails were failing authentication.
There are many factors affecting email delivery beyond SPF and DKIM, and it can be difficult for a small provider to get everything right.
So if you're having delivery issues I'd start with that, not by assuming without evidence that the big guys are intentionally classifying spam just because it's from a small provider.
Been running my own mail for a long time, and with one big exception[1] and occasionally spotting misconfigured systems, any time I've had delivery trouble it has been my fault.
If someone is bouncing you, make sure your ducks are in a row. One easy thing to do that won't catch everything but will help is to send mail to a Spamassassin-protected account, and look at how it classifies things.
[1] The Deathstar has been bouncing me for a long time, and their postmaster appears to be /dev/null. Given that I've had exactly one person using them I wanted to mail, they can bite me.
Except sometimes, like when Comcast looks at your DMARC policy that specifically says "p=none" and decides that means "reject all mail from this domain". Gotta love those guys.
Edit: s/spf/DMARC
It allows the owner of a domain to specify which mail servers are authorized to send mail from the domain.
Being small may not have been their problem. I run a single-user server and haven't had any trouble with delivery to Gmail.
It was only google, only non-response emails, so it is a google specific thing and not general IP reputation.
Switching to fastmail, otherwise exactly the same (domain, equiv dkim and spf setup) solved everything.
Sure looks like I was on the scoring edge, with fastmail being better (or some special trust arrangement) than my previous provider. Which is fine if I had gotten feedback and had a way to resolve this - but practically I didn’t.
Edit: I had a catchall on that domain forward to an account on gmail. It was suggested to me that may have been the problem. But i still do from fastmail, and everything is fine, so it’s more likely that overall reputation or special fastmail arrangements were the issue. Either way, i’m far from being alone with this issue - as evidenced even i this subthread. It is federated but not practically open to everyone, which is an implicit attribute most people associate with decentralization.
Same here. Perhaps I should switch to a larger provider too.
This is anti-competitive behaviour.
Especially clear since, as GP points out mail gets through if it is a direct reponse, meaning they knew very well it was a legitimate address.
This is abuse of bulk mail filter to squeeze out local competitors.
Even if they could kangaroo court it for standard business practices they wouldn't since they don't want to be known as "the dumb fuckers who banned domain based spam filtering" and face pressure from annoyed constituents now receiving piles of spam.
It seems clear from the description above that poster is someone recipient wants mail from.
As for the ignorant users using spam button I've seen that once since I started working.
Happy to do so, but which are the relevant authorities?
I tried searching for it though and this seems relevant:
https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/competition-and-...
Microsoft, Apple. I’d move my mail to one of these to get away from Google but I can’t find a way to do so. I already pay for Office 365 and iCloud but I don’t get to bring my own domain for email. Unless I’m missing something.
I don’t pay Google for my email on my own domain because I got in early enough on Google Apps for your Domain or whatever it was called.
I’m happy to pay a reasonable price - I just don’t know whether it’s possible.
Fastmail is a relatively cheap option. Yandex mail will do it for free.
I've also tried Mastadon but their interface leaves something to be desired. The experience is not there yet.
I do agree on interoperability -- and while Zuckerberg is doing this with Whatsapp and Messenger, we should really take this across most messaging app.
I fear for increasing centralization ONLY because they have the resources and money to do this. This will not change unless we develop a consortium that has the numbers to make it work.
That's not true "federation" the way the OP meant. What's happened with email is that it's turned into an oligopoly: you can have email from Gmail, Apple, Yahoo (if you're elderly), or Microsoft, and that's it, unless you have a corporate address for work. If you want to run your own personal email server, forget it: you'll be considered a spammer and your emails will go into the bit-bucket.
Speaking of Facebook and whatsapp, a while ago I read that you couldn't post links to some other social networks. Is it true and if so which sites are affected?
Imagine your ISP bundling a full node together with your modem etc. That would be a start.
> I think one day we'll discover some ways to decentralize things in ways that resist re-centralization
Centralization unfortunately is still at the core, but we should strive to add more nodes so we can achieve more distribution. The more distributed the system, the less corruptible it would be.
As much as I hate censorship and blocking of content, I believe there is a place for it, for example, you don't want kids seeing pornography and the likes but I do hate it when they do it for political reasons, blocking campaigns or even conspiracy theories, I believe the mind should be able to explore and be critical of everything, this means being able to see/watch everything and analyze.
People say, that most people are connected by i don't know how many direct relationships (6?). The same may have been true for web pages.
When the search engines were much worse, people were using webrings, pingbacks, whatever - I remember going through lists of links at the end of paper magazines. Web was optimized for this kind of searching. It was called surfing for a reason.
Search engines like google hugely distorted the incentives on the web. In the name of seo and adsense people did crazy things to the web (as an ecosystem). There has been an entire cottage industry of individuals creating websites specialized just for getting pagerank for other websites, or for capturing audiences via other tricks (mirroring other websites or public/national databases), or for making the website a soup of boldened keywords.
Anyway, there are specialized searches all around, if you look. Product searches, torrent searches, Shodan, whois, transportation, pretty much anything that's annoying to search for in Google has a better alternative somewhere.
Can't say I see meaningful difference between DDG and Google on this anymore.
DDG keeps getting better and Google has been on a downward spiral for some time.
> It can find result using synonyms instead of the original words.
DDG does this as well. And unlike Google they aren't driving me crazy by ignoring my double quotes and verbatim searches.
I'm pretty sure the vast majority of email servers are corporate servers, not in FANG datacenters.
3-5 years ago I probably would have agreed with you. Today I'm not so sure. And even among the companies running their 'own' email servers, the physical hardware is very likely in a Microsoft/Amazon/Google datacenter.
Many are moving to Office365, and to a lesser degree, Gmail.
Microsoft is making it financially difficult to justify running your own Exchange on-prem.
This is why we’re hoping to steer Matrix from being decentralised-at-the-servers to being decentralised-at-the-clients.
We've seen this with OpenBazaar. It makes p2p pretty simple out of the box but if it's not in browser or a mobile app many won't even try it once.
I'm sure @kentonv has some ideas on what the main roadblocks to adoption are.
Bittorrent doesn't have a search engine, so of course they are not decentralized.
> yet a few trackers compared to clients
Well, not if you count the DHT (the decentralized tracker).
A worldwide Bionet, built from an amalgamation of semi-self-sustaining, solar-powered organics, electronics and EM/radio.
[0] http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20141114-the-biggest-organism...
Well, federation is the sweet spot between distribution and centralization. I've run my own email service for quite some years now, it is just fine.
A lot of people have bad experiences running their own mail senders though, because they do not go through the checklists and deliverability tests to make sure things come through. Google's SMTP service will only accept mail over TLS, most good email services will reject mail from servers which do not have a matching rDNS on their IP, most will reject senders who have not set up SPF and DKIM, some will reject those which do not have a DMARC policy (including a reporting address).
If you use any good email deliverability testing tool, and iron these issues out in your configuration, you can fairly reliably deliver emails.
Currently media is downloading more than uploading even for video games. Client trust issues (and not allowing arbitrary cheating) encourage centralization to at least domain servers for the sake of validation and finding other players.
I think something ARGy like say Pokemon Go but strategic (you have fixed resource pools and open knowledge of everything thus cheaters can instantly be flagged as not playing the same rules). But that would also be niche.
One thing that really could use decentralization is IoT (along with actually making it worth useful and security).
Of course the whole domain is sadly a hot mess of greed often about gathering as much data from their customer, screwing them over with needless connectivity requirements and considering actual functionality an afterthought and security an afterthought to that and then wondering why it isn't catching on. That is a whole other rant.
I believe there are valid technical reasons for this, at least for coax connections; fiber not-so-much. At the same time, I get what you are saying.
...and this is how they want it. In short, they keep the "last mile" from allowing true "peering".
The best you can do - and this is to mainly get around the TOS statements that (technically) prevent you from running servers (as well as physically blocking you from running anything on port 80 and 25 mainly, plus probably others) - is to purchase a business plan instead of a consumer plan.
Though I am sure they will try to (or do) block this if the installation address is for a home and not an office (then again, what about small home offices and such?).
I don't know a good way around any of these issues, as it seems all high-speed providers do similar things (most are aimed at prevention of spam and other similar reasons). Even the WISPs I've seen in my area have weird terms (one seems really great for the rural area they serve - until you come to the clause about not being allow to run BT because of "multiple streams"; I tend to wonder if they only allow a single user to use a browser - on a single page - or what).
The chinese, russians, south koreans, japanese and even the EU are now looking to protect it's turf.
Wouldn't shock me if the internet truly becomes a network of national intranets. I suspect if the EU or any major player truly turns their nation into an intranet, it will accelerate the process with every nation controlling their own network and protecting their own interests, companies and information.
Though highyl unlikely, if china ever becomes a dominant player on the internet, I could even see us closing ourselves off to protect our internet.
I guess this is the price of success. It attracts political attention.
But not even professional sysadmins want to admin and maintain servers (at least for personal use).
Why several companies are trying to build self-driving cars but so few are building servers that you spin up and they're secure and work? We need "self-driving computers".
> Any decentralized system that is more efficient if centralized, eventually gets centralized by efficiencies of scale.
I’d add “or by network effects” since these aren’t “efficienciences of scale” (related to increased marginal value not decreased marginal cost) and are clearly at play with some (many!) centralized systems.
Based on the US military doctrine, we've got 5 dimensions: air, sea, land, space, and cyber. There are 4 dimensions designed by nature and 1 dimension designed by humans. And we're able to engage differently (e.g., at worst, becoming 'domains of warfare') in each of these dimensions.
Wouldn't it be neat to create a completely new 6th dimension, which is independent of the 5 we have, with distinctive features for its system? I'm curious if the brain-computer interface, like what Elon Musk is doing with Neuralink, could be that new dimension?
computer started as one processor and distributed terminals, then cpu spread to terminals, then back to server/clients, then p2p. Lastly consoles are threatened by centralized gaming datacenters ..
Real life rarely provides similar comforting bubbles of likeminded and reaffirming people. You still need to interact with other people even if you disagree with their views. In front of your computer screen, the right forum for sharing your views is just a few button pressed away. It is too easy to avoid the rest.
To play devil's advocate and take an extreme position for the sake of discussion: we don't more free speech. Instead, we need a to introduce a duty to listen that goes both ways: if you want to express your opinions, you must also listen to what others have to say and especially, how others respond to what you say. And you do not get to pick and choose who you listen to. In essence, nobody must ever have full and exclusive control over the shape of the community they are part of.
Why not enforce the law on websites in a similar way: by arresting those responsible for illegal activity instead of attacking the venue?
Conversely, there was an incident of right wing terrorism just last week. This follows a trend of increasing right-wing terrorist activity: https://www.start.umd.edu/pubs/START_IdeologicalMotivationsO...
Yes, left wing terrorism exists, but today people are increasingly associating terrorism with right-wing ideologies because it's in our face and happening with increasing frequency. It's the same reason one might associate terrorism with Islam in 2001.
Furthermore, from your own link, the 2000s saw a flood of left wing terror attacks. That was not that long ago.
Today, ISIS and right-wing terrorism follow a strikingly similar pattern: attract disaffected males on the Internet to communities where promises of former glory will be recaptured through the creation of an ethno-state. For ISIS, they coalesce behind the perceived dominance of the Muslim religion. For the alt-right they coalesce behind white supremacy.
Anyway, I thought this debate about calling out terrorism was had in the early 2010s. The left wanted to call ISIS simply "terrorism" because terrorism is terrorism is terrorism. But the right insisted that it be called "radical Islamic terrorism" because in the words of my family member "you have to call it what it is to defeat it". I agreed with that then, and I agree with it now. The left lost that debate and everyone started calling it "radical Islamic terrorism". Now all of a sudden the right wants to go back to blanket calling it "terrorism" because terrorism is terrorism is terrorism? I'm confused.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_shooting_of_Dallas_police...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Congressional_baseball_sh...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube_headquarters_shooting
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_shooting_of_Baton_Rouge_p...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Chicago_torture_incident
These are just a few particularly high-profile terrorist attacks by leftists; there have been many more.
We should just talk about terrorism in general now because terrorism in general is rising, not any particular ideology.
> terrorism in general is rising, not any particular ideology.
The study I posted above from UMD says otherwise -- that religious and right wing terrorism is increasing in recent years.
> The study I posted above from UMD says otherwise
The study that (unlike the SPLC) doesn't acknowledge the existence of "violent black nationalism" (the SPLC's term), classifying those acts instead as merely "anti-police" and thus not counting them as left-wing terrorism? The study that separated environmental extremism from left-wing extremism? The study with a deceptive chart that depicts 210 where 250 should be and 190 where 150 should be? That study has many flaws.
Still, I must admit the study does seem to say that left-wing terrorism has decreased, after being out of control in the 2000s, accounting for about 75% of all attacks.
However, the DHS, under Obama's leadership, concluded that left wing terrorism is increasing:
"Federal authorities have been warning state and local officials since early 2016 that leftist extremists known as “antifa” had become increasingly confrontational and dangerous, so much so that the Department of Homeland Security formally classified their activities as domestic terrorist violence"
Previously unreported documents disclose that by April 2016, authorities believed that “anarchist extremists” were the primary instigators of violence at public rallies against a range of targets. They were blamed by authorities for attacks on the police, government and political institutions, along with symbols of “the capitalist system,” racism, social injustice and fascism, according to a confidential 2016 joint intelligence assessment by DHS and the FBI.[2]
> Congressional baseball shooter specifically wasn't part of an online community
He was part of several online communities where hating Trump and Republicans is the norm ("including the Road to Hell is Paved with Republicans, Donald Trump is Not My President, [and] Terminate the Republican Party"[3]).
1: https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/...
2: https://www.politico.com/story/2017/09/01/antifa-charlottesv...
3: https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-pol-virginia-shooter-pr...
By the links you posted. But I mean, for example, I'm curious to know why you would consider the beating of a mentally disabled man terrorism. Or the shooting of a private company by someone with a grievance against said company.
> classifying those acts instead as merely "anti-police" and thus not counting them as left-wing terrorism? The study that separated environmental extremism from left-wing extremism?
Why do you want to lump everything together? Anti-police violence isn't necessarily left wing. I know several conservative black men who are anti-police (not to say they are violent). But if you want to play some sort of game with the numbers, then we can lump in religious terrorism and anti-abortion terrorism with right wing terrorism. Personally as far as I'm concerned I don't see much difference between anti-Muslim terrorists and Muslim terrorists and would classify both their views as right-wing. They're cut from the same cloth.
I'll agree 100% that anarchists and antifa are a problem. Although I don't know how anarchists would be considered right or left. Anarchists as I understand are anti-globalists, which would be something the right would be for. They're also anti-capitalist which is something the left would be for. So I don't know if they fit nicely into this right/left dichotomy.
Either way, every single antifa and anarchist could disappear tomorrow and almost no one would notice, and we would still be knee deep in high-profile terrorist activities. The US mail bombings last year paralyzed the nation for a week. Then there was the Squirrel Hill shooting at the same time that killed 11. Now a NZ shooter that kills 50. Each of these actors were clearly radicalized by the alt-right. The bomber frequently posted right-wing memes [1], the Squirrel Hill shooter was on Gab posting his insanity [2], and the NZ shooter conducted his whole attack for the benefit of social media like 8chan and Twitter.
It seems to me then, if we want to stop these kinds of things from happening, we should target the communities and recruitment methods that radicalize individuals to such extremes. A blanket condemnation of "terrorism of all kinds" while one kind specifically is racking up a body count by the dozens seems to miss the point.
> He was part of several online communities
You left out my qualification "same way ISIS and alt-right terrorists are". There's a difference between being a member of a Facebook group that's political, and being part of something like 8chan or gab. I mean, the secretary down the hall is part of the Donald Trump is Not My President Facebook group. She's not exactly becoming radicalized. The Terminate the Republican Party group in your link is quoted "It's terrible what he did," Pearlman said of the gunman. "I — and we as a group — do not condone this at all." That doesn't exactly sound like a radical terrorist recruiting group to me. Contrast this with the shooting in NZ last week and /r/The_Donald and 8chan are calling him a hero.
[1] https://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/cesar-sayocs-social-media... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pittsburgh_synagogue_shooting#...
Because of the things the kidnappers said and forced him to say, and because the kidnappers broadcast the event live to send a political message.
> Personally as far as I'm concerned I don't see much difference between anti-Muslim terrorists and Muslim terrorists and would classify both their views as right-wing. They're cut from the same cloth.
Authoritarian and intolerant? Willing to kill those with different beliefs? That's something that exists on both the left and the right. (Witness the many communist holocausts...) Extremists from the American right-wing and Islamic jihadists share little to nothing in common, save a tactic that's used by desperate or unhinged people of all kinds.
> Although I don't know how anarchists would be considered right or left.
Those certainly are vague labels, inconsistently applied.
For example, there's good reason to call the NZ a left-wing white supremacist, according to his statements. He claimed to be an eco-fascist, a fan of communist China, and an opponent of Trump. But the possibility of a left-wing white supremacist is out of bounds for the media these days.
> You left out my qualification "same way ISIS and alt-right terrorists are"
Perhaps not by exactly the same mechanisms, but constantly equating Trump with Hitler is bound to have an effect on less stable individuals. Someone who hears that message is likely to think they'd be a hero for stopping "Hitler". So those groups probably did contribute, as much as they want to disassociate themselves now.
But I doubt we'll settle the world's issues here, and as interesting as this is, I have to go now.
You're inferring a causal connection here? Where's your evidence? Where's your evidence that left wing terrorism won't similarly grow?
You're making a lot of assumptions to conclude that a medium which allows all people to congregate with like-minded individuals, will only foment aggression among a specific sub-population. Terrorism on all sides waxes and wanes due to many environmental factors. Assuming the internet is a causal factor, then when those environmental factors tilt against left-wing agendas, left-wing terrorism will also increase again.
If the idea is to implement some measures to reduce all forms of terrorism and extremism, then the qualifiers are not appropriate in that context. In so far as some forms of terrorism may require measures that differ from those required by other forms, then qualifiers are appropriate. That isn't the case when you're asserting a mission statement or a larger social goal.
However, the data suggests that left and right wing people are not that different, cognitively. They each exhibit similar motivations to deny science, a similar propensity to believe fake news. They differ primarily in their moral foundations, and so their propensity to violence will only increase when the environment is unfavourable to those foundations.
> The left wanted to call ISIS simply "terrorism" because terrorism is terrorism is terrorism. But the right insisted that it be called "radical Islamic terrorism" because in the words of my family member "you have to call it what it is to defeat it".
Because ISIS is a radical Islamic terrorist group. They're not left-wing terrorists. If the subject of a conversation is a specific group, then qualifiers are appropriate.
In other words, no need to point at a specific ideology to personify the tragedy of the commons. When there is no censorship there will be places where things are said you'd rather not hear. The best advice I can give is to avoid those places, that way you won't hear what they're saying. Even without censorship there are laws which limit what can be said so a censorship-free 'net does not necessarily equate a cesspool.
I'm as far to the left as you can get. I used to support stricter moderation on social media platforms, but I'm putting my foot in my mouth now. In practice, these corporations are just as likely to censor leftist views as they are to censor right-wing views.
Even people who study history and politics don't agree on definitions of racism, sexism, etc. There's a lot of nuance that a $10/hr contractor who sat through a one-day training on offensive content at Facebook won't understand.
This type of censorship doesn't help progressives, it just lets corporations determine the window of acceptable discourse.
I personally have no big problem with piracy as these days most of it is self-defense against "copy protections" that actually hinder legitimate buyers, but I'd be happy if the other three groups would disappear from the planet rather sooner than later.
This is where someone usually says we need a decentralized web. But I wonder if we’re wasting time waiting for some new technology to save us. I’ve been waiting at least a decade and have seen project after project fail. Maybe instead we should focus on building a network of alternative, pro-liberty sites and apps using existing technology.
Which is hardly the worst vice in the world, but when you want to build something that will reliably make an impact at scale, you don't really want to use novel tech outside of very rare cases. You want to use stuff that is dependable and gets the job done.
I'm still a little skeptical of claims that existing web tech isn't decentralized enough. You can still start a website anywhere on the planet in 5 minutes. The big distribution/promotion channels were always centralized long since before the web existed. A lot of these arguments seem to really boil down to "if the government passes a law I don't like, I can't evade it." Governments have been passing some bad laws lately, but they've done that for basically all of human history... I'm not at all against technology which resists bad or unjust laws, but we are never going to get to tech that is 100% effective at evading the law and probably shouldn't since the outcome would be anarchy.
My money is on the web becoming choked with monopoly-entrenching, innovation-crushing regulations, and then people flocking to something surprisingly mundane, imperfect, and not heavily based on novel technology -- simply because that thing is less regulated.
This is because it's not a technological problem. The path to an actual decentralized web is clean technologically. We just need to take what already exists which is currently massively used in a centralized way, and build the services UI on top of it. Of course there are still crypto to add and so on, but if the investment where going that way it would come fast.
The real problem is a business problem. Decentralized services don't pay unless there is something centralized. We cannot expect that (big) private companies will pay for something that's not in their interest.
I've been running an open source company for 15 years. I've see so many times in the voice or in the eyes of entrepreneurs that they saw us as philanthropists.
If we want de centralization, competition and control of our data and software we either or a combination of:
- need individuals or comapnies to pay for it (pay your software provider + hosted fairly) - public funding - laws restriction the oligopoly approach - gdpr++++ - forcing standard based for big companies - forbidding centralization - forcing open-source
Some are voluntary extreme and have little chance to ever happen.
What all of us can do is modify our behavior. This can mean building websites with currently-existing technology, or just turning off the computer more often.
That's what most people want - a curated and moderated (censored) platform from which they can passively consume content.
Any future web is going to have to account for that or else not be useful to most of society.
You can build a working webserver using a $50 Raspberry Pi kit, to host whatever you want as long as it complies with the law.
I would think that the "free speech" people would put their money where their mouth is and learn how to do some of this stuff instead of making Youtube videos about how they're being held back by political correctness.
Isn't it usually the "free speech" crew telling others that they don't know what 'real oppression' is? Try running a website in China critical of government policy and see where that gets you.
The world wasn't created to serve you personally. If you have visions of running the next Stormfront, don't act shocked if Cloudflare and your web host stop playing ball sometime down the line. Neither of those are necessary to run a functioning website.
As a recent meme put it, 'learn to code'.
> Try running a website in China critical of government policy and see where that gets you
Someone has it worse, so we shouldn't try to be better? ISIS throws gay people off of rooftops. Does that make jailing them in the US okay, because it's not as bad?
> The world wasn't created to serve you personally. If you have visions of running the next Stormfront, don't act shocked if Cloudflare and your web host stop playing ball sometime down the line.
Allowing domain registrars and hosting providers to arbitrarily take down websites based on political viewpoints is a horrific overreach. Don't act shocked when tomorrow it will be your opinion that's deemed "incorrect" and you're booted off the web for your perfectly legal libertarian blog
This is absolutely not an obviously true statement, and we have, in fact, quite a bit of situations to the contrary.
For example, if someone is following my persona online and harassing me, I very much want to be able to enforce an "internet restraining order". That almost certainly cannot be done without some level of regulation.
You can say people shouldn't care about getting off social media but people form communities and connections that can be incredibly important to them. Telling them to just suck it up or leave is not a solution to harassment.
You can't conceive of this because you have never been the victim of genuine harassment by someone who has nothing better to do but to harass you.
If the person harassing you is willing to invest the time, he can make your life profoundly miserable as you, rightfully, don't wish to spend the same amount of time fighting the harassment.
And, yes, you can block someone in real-life. It's called a restraining order.
Edit: For everyone downvoting, can you please express how you think clicking a block button stops harassment? Have you actually ever been the victim of online harassment? Did simply clicking a button solve your problem?
So you block them, and they create another user who is unblocked and continue to harass you. Blocking doesn't stop harassment.
> Even my phone can block calling number
My wife was harassed by an ex who used Google to generate new numbers. Every time we blocked one, he would generate a new one. We had to show up to court with a stack of pages of thousands of auto generated text messages before he was forced to stop.
> If you are harassed online, just leave the "social" media
Thus the harasser wins. Why should the harasee be the one forced to change their life, while the harasser gets to do whatever they want?
Keep blocking, never respond. At some point they will stop.
> who used Google to generate new numbers
What ? How is that even possible...
> Thus the harasser wins
Wins ? What exactly ? From my experience they lose a victim and move on to an other one. Unless ofc they have access to you IRL...
First of all, directly messaging someone doesn't encompass the universe of harassment. Harassers do things like post your schedule, your whereabouts, and your address, e-mail and phone number. They'll clone your persona and act as you online, trying to put words in your mouth. They'll contact your friends and family and spread lies about you. Blocking someone does nothing to solve this.
> What ? How is that even possible...
https://voice.google.com/u/0/signup
This was several years ago, but today it's even easier using a variety of platforms. Haven't you noticed an up-tick in robo-calls recently? Harassers use the same techniques to DOS your phone. My wife couldn't get legitimate calls because she was receiving a constant stream of automated texts and phone calls from her ex.
> Wins ? What exactly ?
The goal of the harasser is to control you and make you miserable. Forcing you off of platforms you enjoy gives them a feeling that they control you. It empowers them. Even if they do stop harassing you, they still move on to another victim. To suggest that the harassee should just run away and the problem is solved does nothing to curb the general atmosphere of harassment; it just creates another victim, and empowers more harassers.
> From my experience they lose a victim and move on to an other one.
Exactly. Victims get marginalized and forced off platforms, harassers are allowed to reign free and continue to victimize. It's no surprise then we have an Internet full of empowered harassers and a growing list of victims with no end in sight.
> Unless ofc they have access to you IRL...
Which they often attempt.
From your responses, I'm getting the impression you haven't been the victim of any serious harassment. This is more than just simple trolling I'm talking about here.
> What ? How is that even possible...
I'm guessing they were referring to Google Voice.
That is a completely different statement from "can't really be enforced".
The fact that something "self-enforces" because it might turn into a "legal enforces" is possibly the most effective enforcement.
Even the difficulty of getting rid of certain videos like the mosque shooting shows that censorship isn't as easy as it's being portrayed.
Big decentralized networks would be /b/ and /thedonald, 8chan, Alex Jones and other shitholes of the internet, but on steroids, without anyone being able to at least make it more difficult for these people to get an audience.
You don't have to consume uncensored sources, but in most (all) parts of the world, that is a serious blessing.
If there are some people that cannot stomach the existence of Alex Jones, that is their problem. I think he exploits his audience, but that problem isn't to be solved with China tactics.
And in a similar note, a distributed web needs ubiquitous editing and publishing. Right now I think that both are better served by something really lightweight. A distributed web publisher should be able to run on an ESP32. The editing and display component should run on old laptops or mobile phones. That probably means good riddance to JS everywhere...
Distributed WAP?
I think the problem was just development effort and the pace of development in the early web (and particularly during the browser wars). Shipping an editor with the browser meant that every new feature available to websites needed both an easy implementation (in the browser) and a difficult implementation (in the editor). The editor implementation would often require a lot of uncertain design work as people hashed out what the editor UI should even look like. It forbade the browser vendors from shelling this hard task out to external programs. If you wanted to embed a photograph on a webpage, Photoshop had already spent decades solving that problem; was the browser vendor supposed to duplicate all that work? If you wanted to embed a Java applet, Sun and Borland and IBM had invested thousands of man-years on development tools; would you ship an IDE in the browser? Some content types are just now getting decent editing software, 20 years later.
When you have 150M users browsing and maybe 1.5M users creating content, the economics are pretty clear. There's no sense putting 80% of your development effort into tools that 1% of the population uses.
Interestingly, even after user-generated content became a huge thing and easy WYSIWYG editors became just a JS embed away, the 1:10:100:1000 ratio still roughly holds: for every person creating content daily, 10 people create content *occasionally, 100 register for the site, and 1000 people might view it as lurkers. That indicates that the problem might not be in the tools, and that creating content is just more difficult than consuming it.
Isn't this just a dodgy way to circumscribe the complete failure of the W3C to keep their specifications sane enough for them to provide a reference implementation, even for a simple browser? That's how we arrived at the mess we have today, where you need a 9 figure budget just to maintain a modern browser implementation.
Gopher is still a thing which would very much be editable and displayable on old laptops or mobile phones (even feature phones which only have J2ME [1]).
Some people have been working on a vaguely similar lightweight protocol and markup language [2], which should be simple enough to render in a sane manner even on very constrained systems. IMO, it'd be more interesting than something based on WAP/WML.
[1] http://felix.plesoianu.ro/mobile/pocket-gopher/index.html
Do you want an Alternative Web? We have it. The infrastructure is there. Go back to the good old days. Run your own webserver, your own email server. Turn it back into a hobby, like it used to be. Establish "web rings" with your buddies. The Internet is a boundless eternity, with many opportunities for techies to establish communities of their own.
Leave the terrible modern Internet to the masses. We have endless frontiers to homestead. All this hand-wringing about the loss of innocence and the ravaging hordes of anti-vaxxers and far-right extremists is just silly.
Edit: The way I see it, once the Internet becomes your job, you have lost. When the web was a hobby, it was a great place. Profit motive drove the loss of innocence and was the beginning of the end of the hobby web.
However, discoverability has plunged because of changes in the way Google works, as I have found with blogs based on some of my special interests. Even when one searches for the exact words that appear in posts, Google might not show them at all! (DDG is often not much better.)
So, when people create detailed, useful content and find they are getting no visits at all, this is discouraging.
The first is mainly done - from what I understand - to combat spam and other nefarious things; to keep people from running malicious web sites, and/or hosting spamming mail servers or whatnot.
But the second is more of an "implied threat"; for the most part, they don't really care if you run a server off some other port, use some kind of DNS discovery service, etc - provided it has low usage, and isn't doing anything against their other terms in the TOS.
So basically, hobby sites or similar stuff are allowed to run; part of the reason of this is because there is (or was) a lot of software (games mainly - if I understand right - but other platforms too) that were essentially servers, and became popular with people. Plus you had things like home VOIP, media servers, etc - that people used and liked. So they kinda let some things "fly under the radar" of their TOS.
But they never removed the language from the document.
...and so, that Sword of Damocles is left hanging over our head as a threat: "Don't get too popular...it'd be a pity if something happened to your system".
At the end of the day, you can do all the decentralized node stuff you want to, but as soon as someone builds a sizable community independent of FAANG (I like G-MAFIA too), it will start to do whatever it can to protect that moat and with it, their monetization options. And then we're right back to square one.
It's wrong to describe that as "polyannaish", since much of it has come to pass. Despite its shortcomings and abuses, could anyone say the web has not fuelled "creativity, connection, knowledge and optimism"?
Berners-Lee is an optimist, but he is not blind to the downside of his creation. What happens next is another question.
It's all not doom and gloom, but what society desperately needs is to stop producing/consuming pointless articles such as this one or idiocy like "We should break up Google and Amazon" [Oh yeah? Go ahead and break them up them, I'll watch. Will you be selling tickets?], and to start performing _real_ economic and game-theoretic analysis of possible alternatives.
I don’t know about an alternative web, but something will happen with Twitter, Google, Facebook upping their censorship game more and more.
All gone by the wayside. What you say doesn't matter if you can't guarantee the right number of votes in the legislature.
Why do you think something will happen? All three platforms have a 'pro-leftwing' and 'anti-rightwing' bias, which also aligns with most of the mainstream media. As a result, their censorship is supported by a good majority of the population
I realize my profession and skillset put me into a minority that can even do this. And I realize this last statement is in contradiction to the first sentence of my post.
Oh and if there was a site that did a version of Facebook like it was in 2007, I'd sign up to that for sure.
So now we operate a miniplacity wide internet. Setting it up was fairly easy, because we own a lot of network infrastructure and a lot of locations that are spread out over our entire county (might be the wrong word, sorry if it is), and it just works.
Unfortunately we have laws protecting ISPs in Denmark, so we can’t exceed certain speeds without violating these. It’s made me wonder though, and this is my personal opinion, if we shouldn’t rethink the way we do internet infrastructure to be much more democratic and citizen owned.
> Adoption of a decentralized web cannot play by the old rules. New experiences and interactions that are outside of current norms needs to appeal to individual values, that enable trust and ease of adoption. Pulling users away from convention is not an easy task.
They seem to suggest Decentralization is at odds with "conventional" consumer experiences.
It doesn't have to be that way.
For instance:
- D.Tube (decentralized YouTube)
- notabug.io (P2P Reddit)
Both look, feel, and act very much like their "conventional" versions. Yet both of these are fully decentralized using GUN (my project: https://github.com/amark/gun ). Most users would not even know there is a difference.
So it is certainly possible to both appeal to the masses/convention, while being private/secure and free/open-source and decentralized.
Although I do think we do need NEW and DIFFERENT experiences, things that are "fresh" and fun. Facebook basically looks corporate now. We need to build new UI/UX experiences that define a new "era" of the web, in the same way people look back and remember the 80s or 90s. This doesn't have to be something we look back to, it is something we can engineer from the start. :)
Decentralising domain names is not an easy task, as IPFS is discovering...
And we have Identifi/Iris for naming, by Satoshi's 1st contributor to Bitcoin. The future is here, yesterday!
I fear that the difference they would see is that other people aren't using it and they would go back to where their friends are:(
Without that, I imagine adoption will forever be low, because of network effects.
It's possible the same principle would work here. Post to [fediverse-friendly app] and it cross-posts to Youtube/medium/Twitter. Very likely that APIs would be locked down to prevent this though.
There's also no concrete support for the central premise that big tech companies are to blame. One could just as easily make a case that the massive increase in time parents spend online instead of with their kids is entirely to blame.
The TOR network is a prime example - markets dealing in anything from cannabis to war-grade weapons, huge child porn dumps, malware coordination servers. Or the same stuff in the "clearnet", where as an addition there are huge problems with absolutely vile Nazi propaganda (e.g. Stormfront), Russian propaganda disrupting Western elections, "anti vaxxers" that literally kill people and other conspiracy bullshit.
Society doesn't just need an "alternative web", society needs an alternative society that doesn't make anything devolve into dumpster fires.
Any sort of decentralization will result in dumpster fires, because a significant portion of people are into doing bad/evil things for profit.
No technology can solve that problem.
If we could build technology out of building blocks for which dis-economies-of-scale ("the larger the more expensive", or "the more you own, the more expensive it's to buy more") would apply, and for which any kind of centralization would increase cost the world would be a much more interesting place, and I mean in general, not juts IT, but food production and architecture too... I guess we'll have it when we'll have self-replicable autonomous drones too but that will be the dusk of humanity so there won't be much time for us dinosaurs to enjoy its benefits :(
In fact, a decentralized web would be more dangerous than the centralized web, from the perspective of bringing closer together people with the same ideas and reenforcing them through the echo chamber effect.
A decentralized web would mean that there would physically be no opportunity to come in contact with the opposite view, which will enhance the problems that we now have with the spreading of false ideas.
The dichotomies that would be created would be so enormous that the opposing view would loet any humanity status. The opponents would be aliens, and exterminating aliens would not sound as bad as exterminating other people.
We are past this. Business today is a faceless online giant, nothing human, no mindset at all. Only goal is share price. I think major driver for this is financial markets, a.k.a legalized gambling.
Nationalism is neither bad or good, it's a system wide response to mostly economic signals in a given population or subgroup. If the average internet user understood this, public discourse would be more civil and solutions oriented. Since the issue is not clearly addressed because the political and intellectual class have been purchased by the business elite which engage in transnational profit, the entire concept of the nation state is being undermined from first principles in order to prop up new exploitative economic zones. This will lead to popular uprising and revolutionary war, as it has in the past.
You can of course replace the nation with something better for the individual. America did this in the 1960s by replacing the nation as a people (race) with the nation as an idea (free markets, individualism, equality), this influenced many other nations and won the cold war. And we are probably in a similar replacement phase now, as an Anglo -American -European identity emerges in order to face the challenges of central and east Asia, Africa and South America. The intellectual framework for this new union is not there yet since it is unclear why nations and world zones are in constant competition- far left is offering freedom far right is offering tradition both are struggling to sell the middle who simply want stability.
Answering that question determines how data flows and thus what's currently wrong. Answering that question also predicts why an alternative web would equally fail to achieve separate merits.
Free (as in beer) trumps convenience trumps any sort of rational idealism. It's a materialistic world. Incidentally, it also provides all the tools to "opt out" at a low price. But if you want everyone to opt out (which is what the author seems to want), you'll have to pay for them too.
1) Technology makes bad people as efficient as good people. Let's define "good people" as honest, productive workers who value universal virtues like freedom, well-accepted scientific findings, and necessary progress. Now let's define "bad people" as selfish, dysfunctional news-site commenters who think Hillary Clinton is producing vaccines in a pizza shop on the moon, and demand that you equate their ignorance with your well-reasoned opinions.
2) Perhaps my most controversial assumption, the "everyman" that deranged populism appeals to tends to be more of the "bad person" than the "good person".
3) From 1991 to present, the proportion of "everymen" to "professionals" using the Web has steadily increased, empowering more "bad people" than "good people".
So is it any surprise then, that we're at where we're at? The problem isn't the Internet, Tim Berners-Lee, the problem is that we don't seem to have the courage to admit that the vast majority of people we hoped would use it constructively have chosen to misuse it, empowering them even more to demand ignorance and fear be elevated back to the position of a movement demanding political power.
The problem is our so-called neighbours, and their jubilant disregard for everything that free society once stood for.